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The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.

Alain de Botton

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Alain de Botton
Age: 54
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Romantic
Destiny
Stronger
Life
Nowhere
Longing

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Alcohol-inspired fights are a reminder of the price we pay for our daily submission at the altars of prudence and order.
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Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny.
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It would scarcely be acceptable, for example, to ask in the course of an ordinary conversation what our society holds to be the purpose of work.
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Why, then, if expensive things cannot bring us remarkable joy, are we so powerfully drawn to them?
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The problem is if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you’ll also, by implication … believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there.
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Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.
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When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.
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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.
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We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it).
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There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
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The real issue is not whether baking biscuits is meaningful, but the extent to which the activity can seem to be so after it has been continuously stretched and subdivided across five thousand lives.
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We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds.
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These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.
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Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.
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One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.
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Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.
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The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.
Alain de Botton
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Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.
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People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
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